Anderson University professor and longtime literary scholar Jim Haughey vividly brings history to life in his new historical novel, The Broken Season, published by Redhawk Publications.
Set in the rugged Appalachian Mountains just before the Civil War, Haughey’s debut novel blends suspense, historical detail and psychological depth into a gripping murder mystery centered around Irish immigrant laborers carving a railroad tunnel through the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Haughey drew inspiration from visits he made to Stumphouse Tunnel, an unfinished railroad tunnel located in the mountains above Anderson near Walhalla, South Carolina. He was struck by the story of the many Irish immigrants who worked on the tunnel in the 1850s until the South Carolina Legislature stopped funding the project at the onset of the Civil War, bringing the work to a halt.
“Initially, I was going to try to write a historical book about the immigrant community, and I got an essay out of it. I published it in The Journal of the South Carolina Historical Association,” Haughey said. “The more I researched, the more I realized that I was going to hit a dead end pretty quickly. Most of the archival material that I read was pretty much about how they were building the railroad. It wasn’t about the actual people building the railroad.”
But when Haughey tried to find out more about the people, he found there was little information to go on.
“There were a couple of little mentions and some letters. There was a book published by a priest who mentioned going up to the mountain to say mass for the immigrant miners,” Haughey continued. “The priest was living along the grounds of Belmont Abbey in North Carolina. And I thought, ‘Well, here I go. I’ll just go to Belmont Abbey and see what they have in the archive.’ Well, it turned out that the priest’s cabin burned down in 1893 and all his records went with it.”
Haughey also found an account of a group of men who tried to burn down a chapel where the immigrant workers worshipped. The immigrants retaliated, killing one of the men.
“I was able to find the journal session records for that period—1859. There was a transcript of the trial. It didn’t say much other than just who the indicted were. I discovered later that several of them were convicted of murder and were sentenced to be hanged. This is right on the eve of the Civil War. The governor at the time commuted their sentences to time served, and at the end of story, we don’t know what happened, where they ended up or anything else.”
Faced with little of substance to write a factual account in book form, let alone a chapter or two, Haughey pivoted to the idea of creating a fictional story.
Working closely with an editor, Haughey came up with a manuscript for an historical novel and pitched it to various publishers. Historical fiction, Haughey explains, is a niche area that didn’t interest many of the publishing houses he approached. After a number of rejections, Haughey received an offer from Redhawk Publications, a publishing house in North Carolina that specializes in Southern literature.
In The Broken Season, hundreds of Irish workers endure brutal conditions as they blast through granite in a remote Appalachian camp. Accidents, disease, alcohol, and violence haunt their daily lives. When a young laborer is sentenced to death for murder, a world-weary priest arrives to give last rites, only to discover there’s more to the story, leading him on a quest to seek justice for the accused man.
Haughey said the novel allowed him to combine his love of research with the creative freedom of fiction.
“For years, I wrote about other writers and their work, but I always wondered what it would be like to mix research with imagination,” Haughey said. “Writing historical fiction gave me the freedom to create something entirely my own while still grounding it in history.”
Unlike the structured nature of academic criticism, Haughey adopted a more exploratory approach to crafting the novel.
“With academic writing, there tends to be a formula you follow,” he explained. “But with fiction, I often let the story lead me. Sometimes I had to retrace my steps, but other times I discovered scenes and ideas I never could have planned ahead.”
Haughey has previously published The First World War in Irish Poetry through Bucknell University Press and has spent nearly 30 years writing literary criticism. The Broken Season marks his move into fiction after six years of creative writing.
The novel will appeal to fans of historical fiction and murder mysteries, especially those interested in 19th-century Southern Appalachia, Irish immigrant history, and the social tensions surrounding the Mexican-American War and the approaching Civil War.
In describing Haughey’s novel, award-winning southern writer Ron Rash writes, “Morally complex and memorable, The Broken Season is a magnificent debut.”
More information about the author and the novel can be found at jimhaugheywriter.com.
The Broken Season is published by Redhawk Publications. The book, being released in July 2026, is available through the publisher’s website and other major online retailers.